Friday, May 16, 2008

The Patriots are upset at just about everyone that ran with this and the Patriots' President Jon Kraft has some words for ESPN as well....

"I don't. If you guys can get any of them on the air -- I would argue that there are certain people at ESPN.com who have shown journalistic standards that really are not up to snuff. And the Times, give the Times credit for one thing, they gave us a chance to comment the day before and they actually took some of our comments and realized that certain parts of what they were about to write that were wrong, but there were other things that they still decided to print."

Hmmm, I wonder who he's talking about? Could his name rhyme with Schmortensen??? I kid, I kid. There were certainly people at ESPN (Easterbrook) who ran roughshod with the story as well, and they did a good job of throwing the Herald under the bus last week on ESPN Radio, but ESPN seemed willing to do the background work that the Herald wouldn't do. They still certainly jumped the gun in a few instances on ESPN.com, but in all fairness most ESPN shows (Sports Center, NFL Live) and "talking heads" still referred to the Herald

It seems like to me the Pats are really just reacting to being portrayed in a negative light for the first time by the "Leader". There are a lot of people to blame in this whole mess, but in the end the Patriots still cheated. Not to the degree rumored by the Herald, but none of this would even be an issue if they hadn't.

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Comments:

Mike Fish on ESPN.com, one of their new "investigative journalists", blew up Spygate from February onwards. He, along with Gregg Easterbrook, is responsible for fanning the flames of spygate over and over again. Given ESPN's position of power in the sports community, he had a disproportionate impact on the public debate over Spygate. Now that things are winding down and his salacious insinuations turned out to be unfounded, he is strangely silent and his last Specter column sounded a bit more objective than the tone he took in the preceding several months.

Just a reminder, Easterbrook said he is one of the people that originally tracked down Walsh:http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=easterbrook/080202&sportCat=nfl (key line: "Throughout the fall, I, as well as other journalists, had many conversations with Walsh")

And here is the first of many columns by Fish with half-truths and insinuations that turned out to be wrong:http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=3226465

On the byline for this article it also said: "Gregg Easterbrook also contributed to this report."

Here are some more of the Fish columns:-Stealing offense signals (Ignored the fact that the Patriots had been punished for violating a rule that included both offensive and defensive signals): http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/columns/story?columnist=fish_mike&id=3387401-"Serious questions" -- this is from after the contents of the Walsh tapes were revealed (Ignored that it had already been revealed that the Patriots stole signs back to 2000 + Walsh being on the sidelines in the Rams walkthrough was NOT a violation of NFL rules): http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/columns/story?columnist=fish_mike&id=3386223-http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=3259486-http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=3227592-http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/playoffs07/news/story?id=3227245

What I don't get is how Fish never really understood that the Pats had been punished for the *totality* of their actions, so evidence of stealing signals back to 2000 was not new. . . . .

Isn't Fish supposed to be one of the new ESPN investigative journalists. Someone that is really supposed to know his craft? What happened here?

It's not fair to drag these journalist over the coals when the NFL has been willfully destroying the evidence and witholding information from the public. What they allege in their writing has not been disproven. This is a very shady affair.